C# GUI macro libraries or general approaches?

Question

In a C# WinForms application (on .NET 3.5, probably 4.0 soonish), how would you go about allowing the user to define their own macros? For instance, a user could want the key press CTRL+K to mean clicking a certain item in the menu, and entering some text in the dialog opened by the menu, before pressing "Ok" to close the dialog.

Ideally, our software could provide a macro-recording functionality, that would enable a user to just start recording, perform the desired tasks, and the stop recording to have a macro available. This a feature that they are used to from the old version of the software, that was written in FoxPro, a tool that has such capabilities built-in.

The best option for us would clearly be acquiring and utilizing a tried and tested third party library of some sorts, but ideas for rolling our own version are also appreciated.

Answer 1

If I were working on something like this, I would perhaps integrate a general purpose eventhandler to log events that you want to be recordable ( perhaps either as an individual handler added to available buttons or by creating a RecordedEventHandler class to extend EventHandler and then subclassing all your event handling from that - these are just top-of-the-head ideas so I haven't looked into which would be most viable ) and just use the "record macro" button as a switch for that. There are only likely to be a few different types of event that need to be recorded - button clicks, keyboard input on any text fields, keyboard shortcuts and mouse input on any mouse-input fields so it's not an enormously taxing task although of course working out how to store and bind macros and how to facilitate import and export if you were inclined to do so is time consuming but not technically challenging. I don't know of any libraries for this purpose ( although I expect some exist ) and thinking about it I'm not sure how easy it would be to integrate something like that because most peoples' needs in terms of macros are likely to be different.

If you needed to be able to log events around your application then you may find the ManagedWinApi to be helpful.

Answer 2

I have good experience with "command design pattern" for macro-recording functionaly. Every command fire some application-wide (static for example) event with informations abou parameters etc... The recorder listen to this event and persist the sequence of command calling.